hey guys tom here from fxhome by artlist and uh today we're doing something a little bit
different we think it's been a while since we did a vfd sort of motion graphics type thing but we
also wanted to do something where it's a little bit slowed down and you can follow along with us
so today i'm going to show you how to do a minimalistic long-form shadow in hitfilm so
open up your favorite editor and compositor and follow along with me if you enjoy this
format of tutorials then please let us know by giving this video a like commenting down below
and subscribing if you're not already it really helps us out and we'll be sure to do more of them
so this is what we're going to be working on today this nice minimalistic graphic that you can use
for youtube openings or maybe like the start of a animated film they look great what we're going to
be doing is a couple of things that relate to 3d so we are going to be extruding some text creating
some geometry and then producing a light and shadow in order to create this effect without any
further ado let's just jump into it i have a new composite shot already set up and open and first
thing that we're going to do is create a plane layer and i'm just going to name this background
white is probably not going to be the best for showing where the light is going to be later on so
let's add some color into it that way we know exactly what we're doing with our light
i'm going to add a gradient effect i mean you can add whatever you want and fully customize what
background you're going to be doing i'm going to apply a quick gradient and change the blend mode
to normal and set the color let's go with a nice little pink and then go with a orange and there
we go cool looking very nice and i'm just going to move these into place similar to what we had
in our previous one looks good let's add some text new layer text and let's just name this uh shadows
and i'm just going to change the font type as well just something that kind of fits what we need
it's going to be a lot easier if your text is blockier i mean you can space it out but
be prepared that your shadows aren't going to blend into one this right here is actually the
foundation it looks pretty good on its own but we don't have any 3d data at all really to play
with so the first thing that we're going to do is extrude our text so we basically need something to
stand in the way of our light to create a shadow right now the text is flat in 3d space so we need
to give it that information we're going to be doing this by going into the effects window and
let's just type in extrude and you will find this in the geometry folder let's apply that onto our
text and you'll see already it's kind of popped it out there's no detail in there from a light source
so it's going to look kind of weird and misshaped and blocky now that we have the extrude effect on
we can actually change the direction of which the extrusion is going by changing it to back or front
i'm going to change the type to front just so it's extruding from where our text is created
rather going into our background you can also play around with the depth if you want to but i'm
going to actually just keep this at 50. with that setup let's now add in our light go to new layer
and down to light cool and automatically we've added in a brand new camera so we don't need to
worry about that and we can move around our light source you can see that the extrude effect is
now working we can see that we've created some 3d geometry that we can now start playing around with
in order to create our shadows so i'm going to move it over here for now and just kind of leave
it around that that looks like it would probably create a nice even shadow judging by the darkness
and the w and s now in order for our light to cast a shadow we actually need to enable that feature
so if we go into our light properties and we can find car shadows here and enable that right away
nothing's happened right now i know it's okay so now that our light source can cast the shadows
we need to now tell our objects to emit shadows and also capture them let's go to our text and
background plane and go to the layer dimension icon and switch this to 3d plane we can see it
particularly on our background plane if i start moving around that is where our light source is
so we can move that and it gets wider and bigger however we still don't have a shadow what we need
to do is tell our layers to emit those shadows now that we have everything 3d we can go into our
text layer choose materials and then go on to cast shadows now this right here is a good title design
in fact moon knight has something very similar to this effect but you're not here for that you're
here for that minimalistic graphic look so let's figure out how we can do that now bear with me
because we're actually going to be undoing a couple of things that we've done previously to
make this less 3d the first thing that we're going to do is go into our background plane and turn off
illuminated this gets rid of the light affecting our background now the problem that we're facing
is that our extrude effect is causing the shadow but also bulging out our text so we want to keep
the shadow but remove the the geometry like with our background we're going to go into illuminated
and turn that off for now and that looks pretty good on its own but there is still some depth to
our text what we're instead going to do is grab our text duplicate it by pressing ctrl and d and
what we're going to do this time in the materials is switch everything off and then the last thing
that we're going to do is go into the geometry and turn off that extrude effect and now we're
back to where we started the text is flat but we still have that shadow then from here is the
case of just moving around the shadow maybe even keyframing some movement so it can move across
or move down in width and show the scale of which the shadow is growing this is a great opening
title for something like a time lapse video or you know you're showing that passage of time as things
are moving and if you're not a fan of the hard edges then what you can do is go into your light
settings and maybe play around with the opacity and diffusion the diffusion will just soften those
edges so you can have some really nice lighting awesome job following along with the tutorial i
really do hope that it's been helpful for you if you are planning to use this title design let us
know in the comment section what you're working on we'd love to know that's it for this week's video
but if you're looking for more might i suggest the video beside me or better yet subscribe to
the channel and you'll never miss a single video that we do so i'll see you in the next video